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  • Why: Caste system Where: India

    Kaat

    Fish was an important part of the Dalit diet, particularly small fish that were redundant to bigger fishermen. In her book, The Weave of my life: Memoirs of a Dalit Woman, Urmila Pawar says, “The rich stored the flesh of sode (shrimps, prawns), tisrya (clams) or mule; poor people stored the water in which these fish were boiled. The stock was boiled till it became a thick-like sauce and was then stored in bottles. This was called Kaat.”*1

    DALIT FOOD

    Dalits. Scavengers. This pejorative term is used in India to describe both the poorest people and animals: stray dogs, cats, rats and ravens. People belonging to one of the 117 lowest casts and the untouchables are allowed to eat beef. They can only afford meat from dead animals as well as discarded offal and remains. A cuisine making use of resourcefulness and creativity to obtain as much as possible from available resources is born out of survival instinct.

    To underline how food was used as a tool of humiliation for Dalits, Gopal Guru, professor of social and political theory, Centre of Political Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, describes how the distribution of livelihood resources came to be organized strictly around the “watertight compartmentalization of India into caste groups”, pushing untouchables completely outside the domain of distribution. “The power relationship is mediated through the restriction on food,” he writes in the research paper Food As A Metaphor For Cultural Hierarchies.*1

     

     

     

    1*https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/wJzDhGEE4csaX2BjhjHMsL/A-story-of-culinary-apartheid.html

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